What happened to Max? Five friends go looking for him and end up inside the game HERKULES.EXE — a game that knows their secret wishes and senses their fears. A play for everyone aged 10 and up at the Westfälisches Landestheater, grown out of conversations with more than 100 young people: almost everything on stage — every image, every animation, every sound and even the text — is generated by AI.
The Production
A play for everyone aged 10 and up (school year 5 and above) — a production by ArtesMobiles at the Westfälisches Landestheater Castrop-Rauxel. Premiere: 19 April 2026 · Duration: 80 minutes.
What happened to Max? He used to be one of us, now he is gone. He kept slipping away: skipping school, cancelling meet-ups, nothing but gaming. Five friends set out to find him and come across a game: HERKULES.EXE. At first the game seems like a cool way to pass the time: epic levels, heroic quests. But HERKULES.EXE reads more than high scores — it knows their secret wishes and senses their fears. Level by level, the line between game and reality blurs. Sleep? Gone. Friends outside the game? Suddenly they don’t seem so important anymore. Only one thing can save the crew: their friendship. But is trust enough against a world that holds you captive?
This play was not simply invented — it grew out of real voices. More than 100 young people talked to us: about heroes, games, songs and social media. Their experiences, words and fears have flowed into the characters and scenes. The dialogues, the conflicts, the small excuses and big decisions are told by young people and meant for young people.
In HERKULES.EXE, almost everything that can be seen and heard on stage is generated by AI — every image, every animation, every sound and even the text. But HERKULES.EXE is not just the game within the play; it is also an infrastructure system we programmed ourselves, with which we produced everything. The use of AI in art is controversial, and for good reasons. AI models are trained on millions of images, often without asking the artists whose works were used. At the same time, artists have always experimented with new technologies: with photography, back when it was still considered a fraud, with video, with synthesizers, with the internet.
For ArtesMobiles, every new technology is above all one thing: a material they do not yet know, one that forces them to think differently than yesterday. To them, technology on stage is not an effect but a fellow performer — one that thinks along, plays along and makes every performance unique.
Team
Concept: ArtesMobiles — Nina Maria Stemberger, Birk Schmithüsen | Performance: Jamila Boukhers, David Kiefer, Nele Reins, Alexander Maria Wolff, Christian Zell | Stage direction, set & costume: Nina Maria Stemberger | Audiovisual direction, sound design: Birk Schmithüsen | Creative coding: Meredith Thomas | Theatre education, interviews: Michi Cordes | Assistant director, stage management: Sophie Charlotte Dittmer | Photos: Volker Beushausen